Bernie Sanders Is Even Less Competitive Than He Appears

Bernie Sanders during a campaign stop on Thursday at the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO Convention in Philadelphia.

Matt Rourke / AP

Bernie Sanders’s supporters are fond of the hypothesis that Democratic superdelegates, the elected leaders and party officials who currently support Hillary Clinton by a lopsided-doesn’t-even-begin-to-describe-it 469 to 31, are going to bow to the “will of the people” if Sanders ends up winning more pledged delegates than Clinton by June.

There’s just one hiccup in this logic: Sanders fans seem to be conflating the pledged delegate count and the “will of the voters,” when in fact the two are far from interchangeable.

Sanders’s reliance on extremely low-turnout caucus states has meant the pledged delegate count overstates his share of votes. To date, Sanders has captured 46 percent of Democrats’ pledged delegates but just 42 percent of raw votes. So even if Sanders were to draw even in pledged delegates by June — which is extremely unlikely — Clinton could be able to persuade superdelegates to stick with her by pointing to her popular vote lead.

Sanders already has a nearly impossible task ahead of him in trying to erase Clinton’s pledged delegate lead. He’s down by 212 delegates, meaning he’d need to win 56 percent of those remaining to nose in front. He has dominated caucus states such as Idaho and Washington, but only two caucus states — Wyoming and North Dakota — remain on the calendar. What’s more, the biggest states left — New York and California — favor Clinton demographically.

Including caucus results, Clinton leads Sanders by almost 2.4 million raw votes, 9.4 million to just more than 7 million, according to The Green Papers. So then, what would it take for Sanders to overtake Clinton in the popular vote by the end of the primaries in June?

To estimate how many votes remain to be counted, I first used data compiled by the handy U.S. Elections Project and The Green Papers to compare Democratic primary turnout in each state that’s voted so far to turnout rates in 2008. From 2008 to 2016, the average turnout in primary states as a share of the Voting Eligible Population has fallen from 20 percent to 14 percent. In caucus states, it’s fallen more modestly, from 4.4 percent to 3.7 percent.1

Then, I applied these average declines to the remaining 17 states and Washington, D.C.2 The result: There may be around 12.1 million votes left to be counted. That means Sanders would need to win about 60 percent of remaining voters and caucus attendees to overtake Clinton in popular votes — a very tall task for someone who’s only captured 42 percent up until now.

The much more likely scenario is that Clinton’s popular vote lead continues to expand until the race’s June 7 grand finale.

At the outset of the race, FiveThirtyEight laid out state-by-state targets estimating how well Sanders and Clinton would need to do in each state to win half of the vote nationally. So far, Sanders has averaged about 8 percent ahead of his targets in caucus states (66 percent actual versus 58 percent predicted), but he’s averaged about 8 percent behind his targets in primary states (41 percent actual versus 49 percent predicted).

If we were to apply that pattern to the state-by-state targets over the rest of the calendar, Clinton’s popular vote lead would grow by 1.5 million votes to over 3.9 million by June.

But instead, let’s adjust these targets to estimate how many votes Sanders would need in each state to finish one pledged delegate ahead of Clinton. Even if he were to turn around his 212-delegate deficit and claim a 2,026-to-2,025 lead, he’d only close the popular vote gap by about 1.7 million votes, leaving Clinton with a 670,000-vote advantage. Here’s a rough estimate of how the remaining votes might break down in this generous-to-Sanders scenario:

DATE

STATE

CAUCUS

ESTIMATED TURNOUT

SANDERS VOTE TARGET

CLINTON’S SHARE

4/9

Wyoming

✓

7,966

6,736

1,230

4/19

New York

1,412,388

801,954

610,434

4/26

Connecticut

267,973

154,835

113,138

Delaware

78,351

40,962

37,389

Maryland

682,599

346,624

335,975

Pennsylvannia

1,762,837

1,000,939

761,898

Rhode Island

138,336

82,697

55,639

5/3

Indiana

967,991

568,985

399,006

5/10

West Virginia

264,415

169,966

94,449

5/17

Kentucky

523,479

299,849

223,630

Oregon

508,416

334,436

173,980

6/7

North Dakota

✓

18,278

14,816

3,462

California

4,039,240

2,273,284

1,765,956

Montana

142,410

100,086

42,324

New Jersey

852,395

462,680

389,715

New Mexico

210,977

124,012

86,965

South Dakota

75,404

50,355

25,049

6/14

D.C.

104,874

49,060

55,814

Target totals

12,058,329

6,882,276

5,176,053

Already voted

16,734,424*

7,034,997

9,412,426

Total

28,792,753*

13,917,273

14,588,479

How many votes Bernie Sanders needs to catch up in delegates

*Includes votes for candidates other than Sanders and Clinton

In other words, Sanders may have had a great night in Wisconsin on Tuesday and will probably have an even more terrific day in Wyoming on Saturday. But in the long run, even if he were somehow to win more pledged delegates, he’d probably still wind up short in the popular vote.